The Story of James E. Bennett, Jr.
in his own words
Chapter 3
World War II - Spring 1943 to May, 1946
World War II - Spring 1943 to May, 1946
By volunteering for the Navy, I never signed up for the draft until after the war was over. My father wanted me to join the Air Force but at that time I had a fear of flying and wanted no part of flying. I was sent to Bainbridge, Maryland for boot camp. My first Sunday in the Navy I turned 18. On that Sunday the mess hall served sourkraut. That was my first taste of sourkraut and I did not like it.
Ed. note: sauerkraut
Ed. note: sauerkraut
Boot camp usually lasted three months, teaching the recruits the basic needs that are required for navy duty: such as, the right side of a ship looking forward is called "starboard", the left side is called "port side", etc.. During Boot Camp, all recruits are tested to determine what areas of the navy that they would best fit in, and if additional schooling would benefit both the Navy and the sailor. A leave was granted to each recruit upon completion of boot camp.
All recruits in my group were volunteered for submarine duty, but I failed the physical. I certainly was glad, as I did not want to have anything to do with the subs. To serve in a submarine at that time required that all personnel have a perfect bite. The equipment one had to use to make an emergency exit from a submerged submarine required a perfect bite. I did not have one as my upper and lower teeth do not match up with each other. I completed Boot Camp and was raised a rank, from Apprentice Seamen to Seamen Second Class. Before my boot camp leave, I was assigned to the electrical school at Bainbridge.
After boot camp I went back home and when the leave was over I reported to the Electrical Trade School at Bainbridge. The course was about three months long, teaching basic electrical properties, wiring diagrams, electrical connections, tracing electrical circuits, rewinding motors, etc.. I completed the course and was promoted to Fireman First Class. The class was given a list of types of navy ships that one could request duty.
I signed up for landing ships (L S D) and most of my class went to that group. I believe that I was the only one of my class that asked for that duty; however, I was assigned to a replacement pool for the North Atlantic Fleet in the Norfolk Navy Base. The replacement pool is where a collection of sailors of all ranks, with various classifications and length of sea duty, are assigned until a ship or a navy base has a requirement for a replacement. The request comes into the pool office and they match up the request to someone in the pool, and that person is then assigned to the ship or base that sent in the request.
While waiting for my assignment, I was attached to a work detail in the navy shipyard that was pulling electrical cables on board a ship under construction in the shipyard. We worked a normal 8 hour day shift in the navy yard, drawing normal Navy pay.
I was on the work detail about a month when in December, 1943, I was assigned to the USS Guadalcanal, a baby flat top carrier built in the Kaiser ship yard on the West Coast. They were called baby carriers as we were about one third the size of a regular carrier. The ship was named for the Battle of Guadalcanal. Guadalcanal is a volcanic island, the largest of the Solomon Islands, located in the South Pacific. The battle started in August, 1942 when the U. S. Marines invaded the island that was controlled by the Japanese. There was some very hard fighting and the island was finally conquered in February, 1943.
The ship was based in Norfolk and its primary duty was anti-submarine duty in the Atlantic Ocean. The USS Guadalcanal was the leader of a small task force composed of several Destroyer Escorts, whose duty was to protect and screen the carrier from torpedo attacks and to drop depth charges on contact with a submarine. It was one of several task forces assigned to the North Atlantic area operating out from Norfolk.
I joined the USS Guadalcanal at the start of its third cruise. The ship crew was largely made up with sailors from the western part of the United States with the replacement crews coming from the mid-west or the east coast. I was assigned to the engine crew and, when not on duty in the engine room, worked in the electrical shop. The task force would leave Norfolk, Virginia and prowl a certain area of the Atlantic, as assigned by Washington, for approximately three weeks. The ship would then dock in a North African port, usually Casablanca, West Morocco to take on fuel and supplies.
Casablanca was the location of one of the three major Allied landings in November, 1942 and also the site of a conference between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minster Winston Churchill in November, 1943. We would be in port for three or four days before starting back out. We were given daylight liberty; that is, time off from the ship during day light hours. On one of my liberties in Casablanca I rode a horse for the first time. I was able to visit Rabat, the capital of Morocco. On one liberty a group of us were in a horse drawn buggy seeing the sights when a kid came running up along the side of the buggy, jumped up on the carriage and grabbed a pair of glasses off the face of one of my friends and disappeared in the crowd.
When the ship was reloaded it would head back to the States prowling a designated area before stopping in Hamilton, Bermuda to pick up additional supplies and fuel. Hamilton was a nice place to have liberty. Once resupplied the ship would slowly work its way back to Norfolk.
Planes would fly each day, weather permitting. If contact was made with a sub, the carrier would turn 90 degrees and leave the area. The Destroyer Escorts would surround the contact and drop depth bombs to force the sub to surface. The planes would also drop depth charges. A kill was counted when sufficient debris, bodies or survivors would come to the surface and no sounds could be picked by the sounding equipment.
On some cruises we would lose a lot of planes and would go to Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba to pick a new squadron of fliers and planes. On each cruise the ship would get one to three submarines kills as well as protect the convoys in our assigned area of the Atlanta. We had a sub to fire at us once and it missed, luckily. We were able to track the submarine and between the planes and the Destroyer Escorts, we got the submarine. I was not a swimmer and am not sure how I would have survived in the cold Atlantic water, if we had had to abandon the ship.
I passed all the requirements for advancing from Fireman First Class to Electrician's Mate Third Class. For each advancement you had to take a written test as well as pass a shop test on fixing various electrical equipment, such as rewinding a motor, locating shorts in an electric circuit, etc..
The carrier could not withstand real heavy weather and after each cruise, the ship would have to spend around a month at the Naval base to get the ship back in shape. During this down time we would work on the ship along with the civilian work force. Because of the amount of down time in Norfolk, we were called a USO ship. Sailors were not well liked in Norfolk, and you would see signs that stated "SAILORS AND DOGS KEEP OFF THE GRASS". Usually we would be granted a seven to ten day leave from the ship. My dad visited me one time while we were in Norfolk.
On my next to last cruise on the USS Guadalcanal, our task force captured a German submarine. It was the first enemy man-of-war vessel captured by Americans since the war of 1812. Our planes and radar tracked the submarine and the planes dropped depth bombs. We were near the North African coast line. Suddenly the submarine surfaced after a series of depth bombs and our planes then started strafing the deck of the submarine with gun fire.
The German sailors started abandoning the sub. They had opened up several seacocks to sink the ship. When the sub broke the surface our ships immediately lowered several power launch boats with boarding parties and boarded the submarine. Several Germans volunteered to show the boarding party the locations of the seacocks as well as the locations of hidden bobby traps. By the time they were able to shut the water off, the submarine was at a 45 degree angle with the water.
The boarding party started pumping the water out to stabilize the submarine. We picked up almost the full crew from the water. The submarine was put under tow and then the boarding parties slowly removed all papers, materials, and equipment from the submarine and took it over to our ship, in case we had to drop the tow.
For approximately ten days the USS Guadalcanal, at a very slow speed, towed the sub toward the Azores Islands, approximately 900 miles west of Portugal. We turned the sub over to another task force where it was towed to Bermuda for the duration of the war. We later saw the submarine in Hamilton. After the war the submarine was given to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry where it is still on display (1997).
I was not part of the original boarding party but knew several of the navy crew that were. The capture of the sub was kept secret until after the war, and the Germany Navy assumed that the submarine was sunk. I understand that we obtained a fair amount of information from the submarine such as code books, charts, and operating instructions that was not known to our Government at that time. Captain Daniel Gallery, the Guadalcanal Captain, later wrote, "Reception committees which we were able to arrange as a result may have had something to do with the sinking of nearly three hundred U-boats in the next eleven months".
Ed. Note: the capture took place on June 4, 1944 - two days before "D" day.
At the time that "D" day was announced on the ship's loud speakers, I was in the sick bed with a bad leg that prevented me from walking. Next to my bunk was a German sailor that we had picked out of the waters from a sunken sub. He really didn't believe that we had landed in France. In general, the German prisoners had a hard time believing that the invasion was under way.
On one of our cruises we had a submarine captain, that we picked out of the water, who had a wife in Philadelphia. Before the war, he was in the German Merchant fleet and was given a submarine command when the war started.
Whenever the ship started out on a cruise, we would receive a new group of Navy planes and pilots. On one of my cruises the Navy force group had as one of its pilots, Jack Bales, the future Father-in-Law for my son, Jim, who was born in 1952. Of course we did not know each other at that time.
On the USS Guadalcanal I was assigned to the engineer's room. At various times I would run the movie projector at night whenever we showed a movie. We would always swap movies with any ships that we would come across while at sea.
I remember one time I looked out on the hanger deck from the projection room and saw a plane, that was being worked on, suddenly drop a wing bomb, and it slowly rolled across the hanger floor. Time stood still as it rolled, but a couple of sailors ran up to it and were able to stop it before it hit anything. It may not have gone off, but it sure startled a group of sailors.
Another time I was working on the degaussing cable that ran around the entire ship next to the ship skin plate, below the water line. I was in the most forward part of the ship and all a sudden there was a large explosion and the bow of the ship lifted. I was wedged between the skin of the ship and steel lockers about five feet above the floor when this occurred. Somehow I got over the steel lockers and went top side in a big hurry.
I remember one time I looked out on the hanger deck from the projection room and saw a plane, that was being worked on, suddenly drop a wing bomb, and it slowly rolled across the hanger floor. Time stood still as it rolled, but a couple of sailors ran up to it and were able to stop it before it hit anything. It may not have gone off, but it sure startled a group of sailors.
Another time I was working on the degaussing cable that ran around the entire ship next to the ship skin plate, below the water line. I was in the most forward part of the ship and all a sudden there was a large explosion and the bow of the ship lifted. I was wedged between the skin of the ship and steel lockers about five feet above the floor when this occurred. Somehow I got over the steel lockers and went top side in a big hurry.
What happened was that the ship was launching planes, and one plane had taken off but was unable to gain any altitude and went into the ocean. As the ship crossed over the plane the depth charges the plane was carrying went off.
It could get very hot in the sleeping quarters and, being electricians, our shop was always working on electric fans. We would pull an operating electric fan from the officers quarters and put it in our sleeping area. Whenever an officer would complain about his fan taking a long time to be repaired, we would go to another office area and move that fan to the complaining office area, and so on. We always had more fans in our sleeping areas than any other area.
One time, during rough weather, we had a plane crack up in the starboard catwalk, next one cracked up in the port catwalk and the third cracked up against the tower. There were several planes still out and they were running out of fuel so they were ditched next to the ship and the pilots were picked up by the small craft.
Another time during rough weather the flight commander decided to launch planes. As the sailors started untying the planes, they got away from the crew and the ship's movement started the planes moving around. Several sailors were hurt before they could secure the planes. Also, several planes were badly damaged. The ship's Captain ended up assigning the flight commander to his quarters until we got back into port.
I was promoted to Electrician's Mate Second Class and was transferred to the USS Lake Champlain, the last of that class of carrier, while it was under construction at the Norfolk Navy Yard. Our group was assigned to work in conjunction with the Navy Base work crews in preparing the ship for commissioning. I was on guard duty when I heard that President Roosevelt had died.
Ed. Note: FDR died on April 12, 1945
The USS Lake Champlain was on its shake down cruise when the war with Germany came to an end. We completed the shake down and returned to Norfolk Ship Yard where the hanger deck was converted to a large sleeping area with tiered bunks to start bringing the troops back from Europe for Christmas, 1945. The program was called Magic Carpet Program.
As soon as the ship was ready, we left for Southampton, England to pick up a troop load and then returned to an Eastern port. I got a 24 hour pass and went to London by train. The bombed out sections of London were something you had to see to believe.
As soon as the troops were unloaded, the ship turned around and steamed toward Europe to pick up another load of troops. We also picked up troops in Naples, Italy. When we went to Naples we sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. We did not drop anchor, however the Rock was very impressive as we cruised by.
We dropped anchor in Naples, Italy to pick up a group of soldiers. The city was severely damaged during the war and several ships were sunk in the entrance to the port. On one liberty pass a group of us went to visit Pompeii. Pompeii was covered during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and was rediscovered in 1748.
A military person station in the area could make a fortune selling in the black market, and a lot of soldiers were in the black market. Most of the soldiers spent their time on the ship playing cards. On one cruise, we set a speed record crossing the Atlantic coming back to the States.
A military person station in the area could make a fortune selling in the black market, and a lot of soldiers were in the black market. Most of the soldiers spent their time on the ship playing cards. On one cruise, we set a speed record crossing the Atlantic coming back to the States.
I was discharged from the Navy as Electrician's Mate 2/C. I was offered a first class rating if I would sign over, but I turned it down. During my navy career my ships anchored in Southampton, England, Naples, Italy, Casablanca, Morocco, North Africa, Azores Island, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Hamilton, Bermuda, New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk. I was discharged in May, 1946 and came back to Charlotte, N. C. I earned a couple of battlefield stars to go on the various ribbons that represented the war areas. The USS Guadalcanal task force was given a Presidential Unit Citation for capturing the U 505 Germany submarine.